Review of SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE
The joy of a perfect short novel ... my 2021 favorite
A Christmas story … the stuff of childhood. A Christmas story was read to us each Christmas Eve by our mother in front of a big fire. I cannot trace its origins. It was short. My own family’s versions range from screening Scrooge with Albert Finney to It’s a Wonderful Life with the former beginning to edge out the latter for reasons I do not understand. Capote has his book and the most famous of them all, The Christmas Carol, by Dickens is not only the basis of much of the above but cannot be read in one sitting in front of a roaring fire on Christmas Eve. What then is a Christmas story?
To answer that question, one must read Claire Keegan’s 115-page gem, Small Things Like These. It not only might be my favorite book of 2021, but it may also be the book to read each Christmas regardless of your age or faith. Our 34-year-old son swears he will do just that.
To know good, one must know evil. This is ascribed to many theologians and artists ranging from St Augustine to John Milton. I believe this is true and I think it is what lies at the heart of a true Christmas story. To appreciate Bedford Falls one must imagine Potterville. To save Tiny Tim’s life one must imagine his death. In her book, Claire Kegan introduces you to an Everyman from the very heart of the troubled Irish soul, Bill Furlough, coal and timber provider, father of daughters, good husband, a steady decent employer in a small unspecified Irish town in 1985. There is a river, there are snoopy neighbors and there is an abbey on the hill where the dark workings of the Catholic Church hover above everybody’s lives. The one-day journey of Furlough through the labyrinth of home, work, family, duty, faith and love is a Christmas story for the ages. No Hallmark card glitter or Dickensian exaggeration or 21st century cynicism … just transcendent prose and a perfect ending.
Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
2021 115 pages